Victor Papanek Quotes

You think about the beauty and what you want to transmit. If I think about designing, I can't design.

Order and creativity are complementary.

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order

I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.

When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.

That was always my frustration with so many of these shows, because design is not an ambush... it's a relationship. You have to know how people move and live and work to be able to design for them.

Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'

Design certainly has a cosmetic, aesthetic aim. It always aims at making things beautiful. But relevance is just as important. I often say, 'If it isn't ethical, it can't be beautiful. But if it isn't beautiful, it probably shouldn't be at all.'

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

I want to reiterate the fact that at the core of it all, I am a designer, a creator, and as a creative person, I will choose to be limitless in the extension models of my various ideas on design.

Design is important because chaos is so hard.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era.

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful . . . Great designers also pursue a mission. Great designers design with mankind in mind . . . The crossroads of science and art, innovation and inspiration are what I love about design.

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don't see how it could possibly be bad.

I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?

I have a lot to learn from designers.

The biggest challenge and the thing I find most enjoyable about being a designer is taking everything in and assimilating it for your perspective, hopefully making it relevant and interesting to people.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

A good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints weren’t really there to begin with.

Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.